From RT, with added ‘(JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT).
“Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most incendiary interviews ever in a John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, in which he summarizes what can be gleaned from the tens of thousands of Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks this year.
John Pilger, another Australian émigré, conducted the 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has been trapped since 2012 for fear of extradition to the US. Last month, Assange had his internet access cut off for alleged “interference” in the American presidential election through the work of his website.”
The transcript:
‘Clinton made FBI look weak, now there is anger’
John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?
Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half.
Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.
‘Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks’
JP: The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails.
JA: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.
WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.
‘Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton’
JP: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.
JA: And twelve million dollars from Morocco …
JP: Twelve million from Morocco yeah.
JA: For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].
JP: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.
JA: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
JP: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
JA: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.
JP: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
JA: Yes.
JP:That’s extraordinary.
‘Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition’
JA: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.
She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.
JP: Didn’t Citybank supply a list …. ?
JA: Yes.
JP: … which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.
JA: Yes.
JP: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States?
JA: If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests.
JA: So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate.
‘Libya is Hillary Clinton’s war’
JP:Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us – told you – about what happened there? Because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria: the ISIL, jihadism, and so on. And it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion. What do the emails tell us about that?
JA: Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.
So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.
Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened.
‘Trump won’t be permitted to win’
JP: You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?’
JA: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies… big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.
JP: There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’
JA: We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.
JP: Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?
JA: [Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] ‘deplorable and irredeemable’. It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them. Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense.
‘US attempting to squeeze WikiLeaks through my refugee status’
JP: I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London. Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you?
JA: Let’s let go back four years. I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago. Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side. So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.
WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.
JP: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.
JA: I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000. So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen].
JP: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.
JA: Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalised — this [the embassy] is the world .. it’s visually the world [for me].
JP: It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it?
JA: It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it.
JP: Yes.
JA: So , yes, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for.
JP: Do you worry about them?
JA: Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.
‘I am innocent and in arbitrary detention’
JP: Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’
JA: The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K. Who’s right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse. It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognise his asylum.’ [And here is]
Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to [recognise the UN ruling], so leaving open their ability to extradite.
I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative — that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well. The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.
JA: Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric?
JP: Yes, it’s different.
JA: The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up.
[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
‘NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by U.S. intelligence’; NSA has all of Clinton’s “deleted” emails. [William Binney], theduran.com
Too tragic for words: ‘Chelsea Manning attempted suicide for second time since July – lawyer’, 5 Nov, 2016, RT
Justice4Assange is here, including FAQ and a fact-checker on his case in Sweden, as is journalist John Pilger’s article ’Julian Assange: The Untold Story Of An Epic Struggle For Justice’.
I had the WikiLeaks link to the labeled Podesta email pdf attachments, mislaid it, but this seems to be the same thing from Free Republic.
All of the WikiLeaks are here, in 36 different categories.
A few new Tweets of note, and to me. the Cliinton Foudation pay-to-play stuff is the most important, second is the tiff between Justice (Loretta Lynch: ‘who announces no charges on Clinton email servers’), and to some extent: the internecine war in the FBI, though it’s hard to say how much is simply hearsay…or not):
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you queens of New England.”
~ John Irving (paraphrased) à demain
great.
he’s wrong on Trump. ;) the deep state won’t miss a beat if he’s a elected. the press, press secretaries, secret service, etc., will be annoyed w/having to put up w/his ridiculous mouth. that’s it. in the unlikely, not impossible, case he wins, watch how quickly these same establishment figures & outlets, like the NYT, embrace him & counsel him, “for the good of the nation.”
nighty nite!
first seeing that you’d chosen to highlight his ‘trump can’t win’, i’d pinged that you must have been lookin’ thru a glass onion, son. but okay, i see that you reckon that the various entities would hasten to pacify all ‘for the good of the nation (look forward, not backward). ;-) we may see deep state differently (hadn’t thought media so much), but i can see the DoD, intel and ‘security’ services aiding him, depending on how far he’s willing to be managed.
and sure, there might be internecine skirmishes, but we wouldn’t know save for ‘inside anonymous sources’. but to say the truth, i thought assange did dodge the question a bit, aside from a couple points like ‘class issues’. but the electoral effect of all thee leaks are the least interesting part. lifting the veil on the clinton foundation as funding foreign wars for ‘our partners in peace’ fomenting global insurgencies, as well as the utter hypocrisy seen in the podesta emails dismissing ‘labor’ as a negligible concern, which talking points to use over ’email-gate, benghazi hearings, state giving her campaign heads-ups, “smash bernie to a pulp now!”, the bank speeches, tra la la…showed us how totally illegitimate all of electoral politics really is.
more interesting will be which (shallow state?) ‘prole revolution’ might occur if hair man doesn’t beat atilla the hen, which possibilities thd had posited to you about on the last thread.
as an aside, i’m trying to remember if wikiLeaks had sorted a category for leaks when the hen was in the state dept.
Actually, Billary’s Abysmally MOAR BENTHIC ! :
shoot, bruce; even clicking thru to youtube i can’t read the text, but ‘hillary clinton pedophile ring?’ thought that was s’posed to be bill on the lolita express…
but: want sick? former uk ambassador, now dissident craig murray (i hadn’t chosen to highlight it from wikileaks twit account:
fiddlesticks; murray’s link didn’t kick it up; this does, nauseatingly enough. brother tony podesta.
had to wiktionary ‘benthic.’ tho’t it meant ‘deep,’ which boiled the ramen noodles in my skull. she’s cryptobenthic, to many people. but yes, like a catfish. surviving in a sewer.
funny the thrilling subject of pedophilia came up. i didn’t watch bruce’s viddy, saw alex jones in there & tho’t, “eh, it can probably wait.” but, after jabbering w/a gun-nutter old HS classmate of mine on FB (“you really think they are coming fer yer gunz? *this time*? better stock up some more, just in case. hide a glock in the flour, just to be sure. hollow out the fambly bibbel & put a 44 smith & wesson in there. w/extra bullets. or extra fuel for your flame thrower.”) anyway, i tho’t, you know, bush family adoptee Bill C. is BFF with Jeffrey Epstein. ding ding ding a ling!!! so is trump.
i don’t know. hard to tell what’s *really* going on from the nosebleed seats. but this epstein stuff is not difficult to figure out. we’ll have a rapist-pedophile in the white house no matter who wins.
and the MSM could care less. there’s enough rancid juice on these guys to derail either of their campaigns in two minutes. if that was the goal.
so yeah, for whatever my widdle opinions is werf, the “serious” thinkers & players are worried about “the brand.” they don’t give a shit about any the baloney policy talk either of these spew, cuz it has less value than a jerry springer episode. (sorry, not quite true. that people get worked up about, e.g., anti-immigrant nonsense, is useful to know. so today’s spelling bee champion word is: psy-op.)
‘Do not blame Israelis for settlements or excessive use of force’ –Clinton stance was clear a year ago’, philip weiss at mondoweiss.net
“Browsing the Wikileaks dump of 47,000+ emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta this morning, there are more great revelations about how our mainstream politics really work, when it comes to Israel and Palestine.
Notice the way Hillary Clinton corrects a foreign policy ad in January that shows her brokering a peace deal and pictures her with Israeli and Palestinian leaders:
“One question: the images of Bibi and Abbas w the narrative being the cease fire are off. The images are from our peace efforts not the cease fire. Worried we’ll be criticized. There should be photos from cease fire announcement in Cairo.”
.This email sent to the campaign braintrust last year by Haim Saban’s aide links to a Jerusalem Post list of the world’s most influential Jews. Saban is number 6, and pictured with Hillary Clinton. The list includes also Janet Yellen, Jack Lew, and Wendy Sherman. Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson and Malcolm Hoenlein and Ron Lauder are in the top ten too. Saban’s aide comments to the Clinton team: “You are all in good company.”
Earlier this year Saban responds to news of Clinton victory in the Nevada caucuses: “I’m in Israel and just woke up to the news,,,,,, Haleluya!
Politico says today in a report based on the emails that Saban is “Team Clinton’s favorite billionaire.” And here is Saban last night, thanks to Jewish Insider, with Patriots owner Robert Kraft at the fundraiser for the Israeli Defense Forces– which is to say, these men are funding human rights atrocities. [snip]
bottom line:
“So the Clinton team has an inkling why those Palestinians might be resorting to knives, but it won’t talk about that. Remember that the Clinton team fought to remove any condemnation of settlements and occupation from the Democratic Party platform last June and July, in what Cornel West said at the time was a pander to AIPAC, the Israel lobby.”
Assange is reacting pretty much like someone essentially in solitary confinement of a sort and who knows that the Northern District of Virginia (the IC’s own) is preparing an indictment on what? We don’t know yet.
And the IC is playing this as a Russian cyberattack and disinformation because of the strategic agenda they would like to see going forward; more money for cyberwarfare, where enemies are with the dust bunnies under the bed and result are always secret even as budgets explode. Such an excellent grift coming up for them no matter who wins.
Citibank picked the cabinet. Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner,…Well it’s nice to see the emails of how it happened, but it was obvious from the first and blatantly obvious in the Grand Bargain episode.
Saudis and Qatar. Oil is the strategic reason for being in the Middle East because militaries run on oil; that ouroboros has been obvious as well. Trump will inhabit the same political space if he wins unless he has a secret (and unannounced) plan to goose renewables really hard as an energy strategy. But wouldn’t that piss off his biggest donors?
Israel, of course, is tight with the US as long as AIPAC buys Congress. Nothing personal at all. Just bidness.
Libya. Sarkozy’s war. Berlusconi’s downfall. Clinton’s opportunity to advocate directly for war to show she could. And Obama’s opportunity to hold back the commitment of the generals who wanted lots of new battle ribbons–and take down another of the guys in the US rogues gallery. US made the French do most of the work after the US took out the air defenses and then came back to weaken the Gadhafi strongholds and Tripoli’s defenses for the end game action. For the US, a very low risk plan. Also little thinking about the political plan after Gadhafi fell and the opportunists were at each others’ throats. But it was Ambassador Stevens and his CIA station chief who should have figured out that part. Whoops.
What national figures know and what they say they know are two different things. Nothing is face value. Balancing interests, as they say, and who has power to do what.
Assange is being the ambassador for Wikileaks, which sees itself as a sort of transnational investigative journalism operation. And being transnational is not protected by any nation state, especially one that expects its secrets to be exposed. Ecuador is a limited friend. Apparently that sort of solitary confinement suits US/NATO and other countries afraid of what files might find their way next to Wikileaks.
Interesting times indeed. A check and balance on runaway power. But an imperfect and human instrument nonetheless. And appearing on RT just baits the US IC to go down the “Russians are doing it” path of argument.
And Sheldon Adelson is funding Trump. And when the Alt-Right Trump supporters figure that out,….?
if the joos,* runnin’ the media & atm’s and all, is so smart, how come they hitchin they wagon once again to the euro (=amero) star? i mean, after 2000 years of christ, the camps, crusades, and hannity, they learned nothing about who the goyish enemy is? (*by which i mean the zio-cons of israel. you know, chaim saban.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
hey man, hey mensch, give shalom a chance, ya know? make peace w/the muzzies & fuck the euro trash jesus orcs who’ll just trash you for the sake of a jeebus apocalypse.
“The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction”-shylock
what better way to join the modern euro-model world than by genocide? ataturk’s turkey & the armenians, zionists & the indigenous of palestine.
explain to a doofus, please? ” how come they hitchin they wagon once again to the euro (=amero) star?”
where do we go from here? nowhere, seemingly because: israeli position sacrosanct.
the “once again” part is off. i just mean why trust the europeans & their colonial descendants given the history of pogroms, etc., etc. from euro-trash? well, many israelis don’t trust europe or the us & just use them for their money & guns. (one reason why we all spy on each other. trust is not possible.) exploit the collective guilt and all that. but if the goal is holocaust-prevention, banking on europe/US seems foolish, given the lost history of virulent racism that is really only acknowledged when it comes time to pony up some $$ & bullets for the IDF. i.e., it’s not acknowledged at all. not really, as seen in Gaza or at Standing Rock.
sorry, “long history.” but yeah, that history has been “lost” too.
thanks for explaining. but jayzus, how far was the us ‘contribution’ to israel raised recently? how many nukes do they have? even the wiki entry on that is tragi-comical. but remember, too, how many police departments are trained by the idf; even the federal troops who fight the zapatistas were, at least back in the day.
and yes, someone tweeted that the media go nutz when four israelis are stabbed, crickets about the palestinians killed, nor how many israel is killing more slowly, day by day. yes, collective guilt is part of it, but peter paul and mary got it right sooooo long ago. shucks, i hope this works; i didn’t get a sound icon on the third reboot.
smiles and thanks to both of you, and had i the energy, thd, i’d be tweakin’ your comment a wee bit re: ) leading from behind, sarkozoy bombing first because; running for re-election, twisting arms for a bare quorum of the ‘african union’. never mind.
tomorrow i’ll add a personal note that is quite on topic, but in a sideways way, i guess i’d say. yes, the personal is the political, the political can become quite…personal. trying to rise from feelin’ low as a lowly worm’s belly today. never mind my dreams of warehouses of ‘lost people’ as in dead-letter offices, all of the same name in each warehouse, stored in wooden cabinets reminiscent of borg regeneration stations.. i reckon i’m not alone in such nightmares, and consider them as ‘bearing witness’ subconsciously, rather than ready for a rubber room. ;-)
when will the citizens off the planet unite to say ‘enough!’ to war, to advise cooperation, not competition in order to say save humanity? otherwise, we declare humanity a failed experiment, and give this gorgeous big blue ball on the edge of the milky way…back to the dolphins and cockroaches to try again. tomorrow, then; for tonight:
rest and restore as you can; i’ll try to, as well.
The importance of Sarkozy is that the war was triggered by creating refugees to Italy, who wound up in France because Italy would not accept them. And in a French election year in which Sarkozy was most afraid of Le Pen. The orchestration of the war with as few US fingerprints on it as possible was likely arranged in those hasty meeting in Paris. And that meeting came after two Libyan Air Force pilots defected to Italy. That would be a point to begin any history and a backward investigation into origins and a forward one telling how the war unfolded in reality as compared to how it unfolded on al Jazeera. I’m not shopping a book proposal, but a I wish some good historian of the area would do a history like that.
What caused the eruption and the flow of refugees is the interesting point for historians to investigate. Was Gadhafi so slack that he allowed a US fifth column to accumulate in Benghazi? Or did the CIA station get dropped in after Benghazi was “liberated”? One wonders who the long-term insiders were, for example? Moussa Koussa wound up in Qatar at last notice. How long was he involved in toppling Gadhafi?
The advantage of leading from behind is you try to find out where the crowd is going when they get it all sorted out, and then position yourself first in that direction. My sense is that Obama was weighing the international and domestic political consequences and Clinton as Secretary of State was advocating Responsibility to Protect.
All good thoughts for the political and the personal in the coming days.
interesting THD.
http://www.spyculture.com/clandestime-091-cia-james-bond/
“What connects JFK, Allen Dulles and the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs to the movies Thunderball and Goldfinger? The answer is the relationship between the CIA and James Bond….
…All of which brings us neatly onto the Cuban question. But in case anyone doesn’t know what I mean by that – Topaz is all about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. And so, in a somewhat more oblique way, is Thunderball [here, the novel, not the movie]. In Thunderball Largo, on behalf of SPECTRE, hijack a plane carrying two nuclear bombs and use them to blackmail NATO governments. They hide the missiles in the Caribbean.
The novel came out in March 1961, literally weeks before the CIA’s failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. When Castro took power in 1959 then Vice-President Richard Nixon went to visit him. He came back certain that Castro was a dangerous Communist who couldn’t be reasoned with, and memos said that the elimination of Castro instantly became a priority. As middle class Cubans fled to southern Florida the CIA recruited and trained approximately 1300 to form a small covert army. After an aerial attack using American planes painted with Cuban colours to try to destroy the Cuban Air Force, the 1300 Cuban exiles were landed on a beach at the Bay of Pigs. The CIA and American government plan was to pretend they weren’t exiles but were a spontaneous uprising from within Cuba. But the invasion failed miserably, the Pentagon never got permission to step in on behalf of the fake uprising, and many of the CIA’s covert army were killed or captured.
This invasion had several massively important consequences. First, it was a huge and humiliating failure for both the CIA and the USA as a whole. Second, it forced the CIA out into the open, at least to some extent, whereas before they had maintained almost total secrecy. The failure of the invasion led JFK to sack Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA. It also led to a follow-up operation, codenamed Mongoose, where the CIA carried out sabotage against Cuba, used local mafia to cause trouble, and ultimately was going to lead to a second attempted invasion using another army of Cuban refugees.
The Soviets got wind of all this and began the process of moving nuclear missiles into Cuba…”
unintended consequences: well, yay-uss. is it me, or do similar scenarios keep repeating? of course, some provocative acts by the exceptional hegemon might just earn the desired consequences expected. as in: nato provoking the bear. you’d be surprised how many ‘progressive’ commenters are yet, again, still…flying their red scare banners. revanchism!!! chechnya!!!! south ossetia! (already debunked by an independent eu commission (well, kinda sorta ‘independent, that is.) chechnya i missed.
most of your points taken, and i’d forgotten the refugees to italy in the mix, but i reckon that his re-election was far more important. having seen your comment in email, in my ‘spre time’ i went a-hunting for more about the three harpies who’d advocated r2p, and my guess is they played a larger part than is widely known. clinton at state. sammie p. a the un human rights commission (key whisperer, i’d think) and creepy susan rice as ambassador to the UN.
zo…i read the daily beast, andrew bacevich, justin raimondo on bernard (ack) henri levy, and more. never saw any answers to your questions, except why the hell the transitional government was ok’d by the ptb, and some weird stories about al quaida and col. khalifa haftar, formerly in gadaffi’s military; how convenient. when the cia station was…created, i’d guess that was there during the 1700 or some such bombing sorties, wouldn’t you? but i get your drift on someone who really could testify doing the history….some day.
and that hillary set up a central bank jig-quick has always made me wonder. what the u.n says it’s holding doesn’t come close to the alleged gold and holdings of gadaffi.